


Cool Kids Don't Die

by Chainofprospit



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-12 13:59:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4481867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chainofprospit/pseuds/Chainofprospit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noah Czerny never expected to die. </p>
<p>Yet there he was, in all his ghostly semi-corporeal glory, a dead boy somehow stuck in Henrietta past his passing. What does a dead seventeen-year-old do with seven years, anyway?</p>
<p>(An exploration of pre-canon, post-death Noah and how he ended up with the Gansey collective. Written to fulfill my own curiosity.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> From Tumblr: 
> 
> "also montparnaughty and i have been talking and what did noah do between dying and meeting gansey?? did he just hang out and pop in and out existence? did he ever try to talk to his sisters again? when did he meet gansey and ronan? did he unintentionally get drawn to gansey bc of cabeswater shit or did he choose to attach himself to him? did noah come before ronan or after ronan? was he in monmouth before they moved there or did he come later? did he purposefully work to make them think hed always been their friend or did the mind altering happen unintentionally? i need to know" (via fluffalow @ tumblr)

Noah Czerny never expected to die.

Most people don’t, really, he figured. Bar hadn’t. No one he knew really thought about death, as far as he knew. People were afraid of it, sure – but fear of death was sort of like pining, in that you rarely really expected to actually confront the possibility you are preoccupied with.

Maybe old people expected to die. It was a new, distant kind of thought, because Noah had never really thought about growing old, before, either.

Perhaps that was for the better, considering that now he never would.

There were a lot of things he would never do, now, come to think of it. Graduating, for one. That had always seemed like a given. He slacked off on a lot of classes, sure, but he complained about school more than it really called for; there was never much of a likelihood of him failing. His parents weren’t paying thousands of dollars a year for nothing. Or, they hadn’t been. He supposed they wouldn’t really need to pay anymore. It was a morbid relief.

He wouldn’t ever get married now, either. Parents paid for that, right? He wouldn’t ever move out. That was kind of weird. He wouldn’t ever join a rock band. That actually stung. He wouldn’t have kids, he wouldn’t go to France, and he wouldn’t ever ever beat his highest score on Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

He guessed Bar might end up with his Playstation, and then wished he hadn’t.

One of the oddest things about dying, though, was to realize he might not even get that properly. This conclusion came about maybe a week after he’d died, when they hadn’t yet held a funeral. He’d been waiting for days for them to call about it, order him a bunch of flowers, lilies, probably, his mother’s favorite – a coffin, mahogany, smaller than it ought to be, or maybe they’d have to get him a full sized one and he’d just have a foot of extra room in it; he wasn’t quite sure how coffin making worked, really, now that he thought of it. Did they come pre-made, or did you order them to the exact sizes? He had never thought of any different types than just, baby coffin and adult coffin. He was stuck in between infancy and adulthood, permanently now.

But in the end it didn’t matter, because they never held a funeral. The reason for that was that Noah Czerny, officially speaking, wasn’t dead. He was missing.

Only I _am_ dead, he wanted to say. I’m not _gone_ , I’m just finished. Remember me!

But he couldn’t, because he was dead, and dead boys didn’t talk.

* * *

 

It wasn’t really anyone’s fault that no one knew Noah was dead. He didn’t like to admit it, but it was true. He hadn’t believed it himself, at first. He’d never expected to die, but if he had, he wouldn’t have expected to keep on being after he did. Still, that was what happened. He’d trekked all the way back to the road from the forest, and then all the way from there down to the bus stop, and he’d waited hours and hours for the next lonely Henrietta bus to sputter and cough up next to the ridged silver bench there, and then he’d taken the long route home because he forgot where the proper stop was, not being used to public transportation. It had taken so long that by the time he finally got into his house and flopped onto his neatly made bed (he never made it himself but it was always neatly fixed up waiting for him on the weekends he came home), it was dim, and he decided that his brain could use a break, and that he’d turn it back on again in the morning.

In the morning, his brain didn’t really offer him anything except: Why didn’t Mom or Sarah wake me?

When a few more hours provided no further insight (the house was so quiet), Noah had decided to ring up his best friend, Barrington Whelk. It rang, and rang, and rang, and didn’t answer, and while laying back on his hypoallergenic pillows, he rolled his memory back to the night before last, which was the last time he’d seen him.

It was only then that he recalled, with a dizzying nausea, that Barrington had killed him.

And then he stopped being.

That was the first time he’d gone Out. He reappeared three days later, found his mother crying in her study, and promptly fizzled away again. By the third or fourth time, he’d gotten a hang of the shock, kind of, and managed to mostly stick around. Since there wasn’t much to do in the house when you couldn’t watch TV or play video games, and all of the occupants were no longer speaking to him, as he wasn’t alive, he spent most of this time for the next few days either following around the mansion’s female residents or contemplating ghosthood in general.

It was hard to keep his thoughts very substantial and straight-minded when he didn’t have a real brain to keep them in, he found. He was present enough, though, to notice the part where they didn’t hold him a funeral, and now it was getting kind of distressing to be in the limbo not just of being dead but not passed on, but also of being dead while no one else had gotten around to acknowledging it yet. The only people who knew were him and Bar. The former obviously couldn’t tell and the latter was a conundrum he couldn’t really bring himself to think about.

When he’d listened to Sarah ask their mother, tremblingly, whether she thought Noah was back yet for the fourth time, Noah decided to go out.

It was a pretty quick study to figure out that doors and sneaking weren’t really a problem when you were a ghost, so it was surprisingly easy to leave the house and find his way back to the road. Once he was there, there were a few minutes of struggle while he wondered if there was a simpler way to get all the way back to Henrietta – the Czerny property, like most Aglionby students’ actual homes, was not actually within limits of the tiny town, and it was a bit of a drive out to make it there and back. As it turned out, though, bus riding was pretty easy when you didn’t have to pay – the first night had indeed not been a fluke – and the ride into the rural-esque town was sort of a nice way to tune out and forget about the whole being-dead thing. The scenery was ambers and bleached yellows and spring greens and the distant lilac mountains, ravens perched on walnut-colored wood fences, and, eventually, the growing assortment of thin-paneled Victorian homes in various pastels. It was familiar and slow and calming in that way that he was never able to take in when he was at the wheel of his red Mustang, his usual ride in and out of town, and he found himself comforted by the lazy quiet feel of it. He’d never really paid a lot of attention to the scenery before, preferring to score the gritty asphalt with bone-white skateboard wheels and laugh screeching into neon-lit parking lots for pizza and maybe hoot intoxicated against fire escape ladders when he wasn’t on campus studying.

Funny how you looked at more things when you died.

Or maybe that was just him. He wondered what the other Aglionby boys were doing. Still tearing up the streets, probably. The fields and home-made windchimes and front porches weren’t for them, they were too Good for that. Noah had been, too. It was far too Important being an Aglionby boy to bother paying attention to the drabness of rural Henrietta.

He didn’t feel that important now, the town stolid and still and static, the same as it had always been, the same now that he was dead, unknowing and unbothered. Maybe if he waited long enough they’d figure out that he hadn’t run away, hadn’t left behind his girlfriend (she was probably mourning into one of Bar’s silk shirts, he thought, and immediately hated himself for it, though also her, a little, too), hadn’t pulled another classic Aglionby boy stunt and spontaneously tripped to Atlantic City and decided not to come back until finals. Maybe if he waited long enough they’d get scared, get concerned, get convinced he was not gone of his own will; they’d look for him, he’d get sirens and milk cartons and helicopters and news shows – Lily would be so excited to be on TV; she’d always dreamed of it – and maybe they’d find his body and…

… and then what?

He wouldn’t really be back, still. He’d get a funeral and flowers and a proper mourning period and then they’d move on anyway. And he’d still be here.

Even with that unpleasant thought, Noah still spent the next unbroken stretch of days riding into town on the bus each morning. In the dusty midday, he’d loiter in the small convenience store down from the bus-stop and peer over people’s shoulders to see what was being reported in the local newspaper. Every mention of DEAD or MISSING made him jump, but as each day passed, he found himself still not somehow worthy of making headline material. In the side columns on the third day he saw the last name Whelk and felt a peculiar sensation like his soul trying to imitate a heart stopped, but as it turned out, the article had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the updated gossip about the Whelk family losing its massive fortune. He accidentally caused a cold spot in the store by the newspaper reader by the strange seizure of uncertainty afterwards, and felt so bad about it that he managed to work himself into disappearing almost immediately afterwards, and came back again in bed the next day without having got to spend any more time in Henrietta at all.

The May days came and went like this. The longer Noah spent as a dead person, the more apparent it grew that he would possibly never be acknowledged as one. He tried not to watch his family as much, now, because despite their obvious worry, the local police’s consistent “no leads” continued to suggest only an impulsively disappearing boy, the thoughtless and foolish whim of an excitable, selfish, carefree Noah, whom Dead Noah found himself slipping farther and farther away from as time past.

Dead Noah didn’t like Alive Noah all that much for making the terrible thing that had happened to him seem so implausible. He liked him even less suddenly for being the sort of person who everyone readily believed would abandon friends, girlfriend, family at the drop of a hat to careen towards distant skylines who-knew-where out of stupidity, out of impulsivity, out of some distant separation from consideration, because who needed to be considerate when you could just have fun and do whatever you wanted? Dead Noah, considerably more sullen than Alive Noah, found himself resenting his past self for thinking he _could_ do whatever he wanted, when clearly, that was not actually true once you went and got yourself dead.

He carefully avoided thinking about what Barrington Whelk might be saying to the police to contradict or support this supposition. He carefully avoided thinking about Barrington Whelk at all.

He thought maybe he should stop remembering stupid Alive Noah, too, and just focus on being a kick-ass ghost.

He didn’t really know how to be a kick-ass ghost. So far being a ghost had mostly just consisted of hanging around and being sad about stuff. It was a pretty shitty un-life, activities-wise. But if Alive Noah was good at anything, it was Ignoring Responsibility and Messing Around. So Dead Noah figured he’d probably be just as good at Ignoring Emotions and Messing Around.

Remembering being alive was just depressing, anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

This was how Noah decided to devote himself to becoming a Super Cool and Spooky Ghost.

Alive Noah had not really been the sort of person to devote himself to things. Not projects, anyway. He’d devoted himself to Tony Hawk Pro Skater, for a while, but after repeated frustrations of attempts to beat his own high scores to no success, he’d tossed the controller in the corner of his room, and it ended up buried in dirty laundry. He hadn’t devoted himself to school, really, not being much of a Scholar, though he did enjoy some classes. He would have devoted himself to his car, which was probably his favorite object in the world, but it hadn’t taken long to determine that to be actually good at cars required effort and skill, and that wasn’t really something he was very interested in. So he just devoted himself to looking really cool in it instead, which didn’t really require much devotion at all.

It wasn’t that Alive Noah didn’t care about _anything_. In fact, he devoted himself quite a lot, to people. People were much better than projects or accomplishments. Projects and accomplishments required work and effort, and people just required adoration and the willingness to get into whatever kind of trouble that particular person was into, which Noah was good at. He liked people; he’d devoted himself readily and whole-heartedly to his best friend, whom he spent all his time with, and had considered himself quite devoted to his girlfriend Erika too, although he had to admit to an underlying sense that she might not be quite as devoted to him. Still, they had quite good times together, and it was all a lot of fun; until he died, anyway.

Here was the unfortunate thing about being dead: the people you had been devoted to in your alive-ness stopped being devoted to you back. If they ever were at all. Beyond that, you could no longer really spend your time adoring them or spending time getting into trouble together, as adoring a person and spending time with them as a ghost tended to constitute that ghostly stalking that could only be called ‘haunting,’ and was not nearly as fulfilling as a two-way friendship. Therefore, Dead Noah was determined to turn around his habits to accommodate this new reality of ghostliness. Lacking persons to share his unlife, he would now be the sort of Noah who devoted himself to Projects and Things, and as a ghost, that meant becoming Spooky as Hell.

It was not as easy as you may think.

Dead Noah had decided to like Henrietta. The calm and numbing blur of the landscape on bus rides, the underpopulated Main Street with that touristy-kitsch small town charm, and the constant presence of yelling ravens seemed to him a reasonably appropriate canvas for a ghostly life. It had been boring when he had friends and a Life, but without the option of either of those things, the deadness of the town now seemed just right for the New Him.

However, as he soon discovered, there was another effect the rural feel of a town like Henrietta had: paranormal echoes just kind of faded in like they belonged. As it turned out, this was a fact which rather counteracted the effects of attempted haunting. He’d spent two days figuring out how to move a set of hollow silver windchimes by himself, only to discover that the singing metal peals were not noticed even remotely by any victimized passersby. In fact, he had moved from porch to porch finding any such instruments to ding, and the most drastic reaction he’d gotten so far was a plump middle-aged woman informing an uninterested morning dog-walker that “the faeries must be out and about it again,” with a sincere smile so small and curved that it obscured the shape of her lips entirely.

Annoyed, he’d tried to kick her in the shin, but her only response was to interpret the sudden cold beneath her skirts as a (possibly faerie-swept) breath of wind, and “O-ho-ho”ed merrily.

And so he had to devote himself to more ingenious methods of being a ghost in Henrietta.

Haunting, as Noah was learning, tended to be pretty hit-and-miss. Sometimes he could make something happen if he concentrated really hard for up to five minutes, and sometimes he’d bother something by complete accident just getting distressed. A lot of times he’d get worn out just thinking about what he wanted to do, and if he spent too much energy at once, he’d snap Out like a light. When that happened, it was anyone’s guess when and where he’d find himself aware again. If by “anyone,” you meant “no one,” because no one was guessing. It seemed that whatever Powers that Be had decided to grant him this form-spirit-existence-consciousness after death did not have the care to be very consistent about it. It was less like having superpowers and more like having dissociative fugue disorder, and also happening to be invisible.

Some things were easier to affect than others. Electricity, for example, was more likely to be malleable than a lot of other things, and he had been able to turn the dial on a radio once and cause flickering power on multiple instances. Annoyingly, both sorts of occasions had been taken easily in stride as the fault of HEPCO, which was the apparently notoriously unreliable local power company.

Who knew.

(Not Noah. Aglionby Prep tended not to suffer from shortages of any kind, power or otherwise.)

Horror movies were wrong about some things, anyway: he could absolutely not fog up a mirror just by standing next to it, and he sourly regretted spending three hours in a dirty public restroom trying. He also had not had any success writing creepy messages in blood on any walls, though this might be more due to the fact that Noah was squeamish of blood and couldn’t bring himself to try it. That was the other trouble, actually. Most of the horror films Noah had seen involved stuff he could not imagine himself recreating in real life. Death. They tended to involve possession and Satanic ritual and pushing around children and whatnot. Noah was afraid of possession and maybe demons and at least a good 50% of children.

He was finding a lot more things to be afraid of dead than alive. This was probably because there had been no reason for him to ever have to encounter things he didn’t want to when he was living and privileged and rich, but the general unenjoyableness of anxiety made this dissonance of his dead life from his live life seem a lot more dismal than ironic.

Still, dismal didn’t quite fit into his projected goal of Terrifying Ghost. Therefore, stubbornness required him ignore it and continue to explore the capabilities of supernatural existence. For fun, he tried loitering at the frozen yogurt shop Bar had always refused to eat at. (“I don’t like sweet things,” he had said flatly. “You like me,” Noah would respond with a sugary grin, and Bar would have to consent a grudging smile.) It was already chilly inside the shop, so he couldn’t really send shivers down anyone’s spine, but he could try to whisper in their ears amusing combinations of ice cream flavors or toppings, and see if the echo of his voice would influence their dessert decisions. This actually did work a decent amount of times, and became a favorite activity of his.

It was not the most spooky, but everyone had to start somewhere, he reasoned. Besides, diabetes was scary, right? Kind of?

Another ghostly activity taken up on his quest to become Ultimate Ghost Tier was talking to ravens. Since they were birds, he couldn’t actually tell if they could hear or see or understand him, but he liked to pretend they could, and ravens were a Spooky enough creature that he felt it counted for points that he should devote such a chunk to imitating their caws and tossing pebbles in their general direction. (Sometimes the pebbles were imagined, sometimes he managed to move real ones.)

It wasn’t a very glamorous repertoire, but such was death. And as the only dead person he knew, Noah Czerny felt he was qualified enough to be considered a relative expert on such things. Therefore, things continued in this manner through spring and into the burnishing beginnings of summer.

Until one day he found himself jerked violently into awareness in the doorway of his home’s downstairs living room, and unable to move. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mild recreational drug use.

Sarah Czerny, Noah’s middle and closest sister, stood in the doorway. Her fists were clenched at her sides, her eyelids were scrunched shut, tight, like the glossy knot of hair at the nape of her neck. Her soft mauve lips were stretched thin, and through them he could hear her whispering, quiet and desperate:

“Noah; Noah; Noah –”

Noah froze. They were close to the same height and he had been spirited (ha) directly in front of her. If she opened his eyes, she would have been looking straight at him. A foot closer and their noses could have touched. The space between them felt like a hair’s breadth; felt like a galaxy.

Still, she whispered for him.

“Noah, please, come back to us, please God send him a sign, send him back to us. I know you must have had your reasons, Noah, but it’s time to come home now. It’s time now. You have to come home. Please be there, please be there, please be there, Noah, Noah, Noah…”

He had a vague sense of trying to figure out in his head where ‘there’ was, or when ‘now’ was, even, but he was interrupted by his mother, who had clicked into the opposite hallway, pausing in front of the hall mirror to push in her earrings. Whorls of white gold around a single pearl. Her favorite.

“Sarah. What are you standing there for? Are you ready?”

He couldn’t tell if his female family members were dressed for a wedding or a wake. His sister’s dress was robin’s-egg blue; his mother’s, navy. Where were they going that she’d expect him to be present for? He racked his brain, trying to fathom what Alive people did, where he might have been. How far away the idea seemed; how alarming that realization was.

Sarah opened her eyes. “Where’s Lily? Is she out with Dad already?”

Her mother sighed. “Your sister,” she said, in that same way that she had always reported the eldest Czerny sibling’s misdeeds to their father by starting off with ‘Your son,’ as though pushing off responsibility on him, or now, on Sarah, for being related to the troublemaking family member in question, “has elected not to join us.”

“ _What!_ ” Sarah shrieked at this, gentle hands immediately balling into fists again. “But what if Noah’s there! Mom, you can’t let her stay home, she’s being a _brat_ , she’ll _regret_ it when she doesn’t see him –” Now she had turned to yell over her shoulder at one of the doors down the hall. Mrs. Czerny remained silent, rubbing a temple.

“Lily!” There was no answer from the study; the youngest Czerny sibling was probably upstairs in her bedroom, listening to music. Sarah wasn’t having it. “ _LILY!_ What do you think you’re doing, staying home! Mom told me you think you’re not coming! I can’t believe you’d be so stupid and selfish and a _pig_ –”

“I hate him and I don’t forgive him and I’m not coming. I’m going out for ice cream with Other Sarah and Maggie and Joseph Turner. Get out already; you can’t make me.” The plaintive yelling response came from upstairs, as a transfixed Noah had suspected.

Sarah remained still and wound tight. After only a breath of delay, she burst into angry tears. “I hate her. _I hate her._ Why didn’t you do anything? Drag her along like a circus animal; she deserves it, she’s a brat. God, I _hate_ her.”

“Language,” reminded their mother softly, distantly, as if her eldest daughter were not crying in front of her at all. Sarah said nothing.

“It’s time to go. We won’t be late.”

As though a miserable ghost herself, Sarah, after a moment, skimmed silently behind her mother. The two of them were straight-backed and shouldered. Their chins were held high, and their makeup intact, despite the younger’s wet cheeks. Sarah a smaller version of her mother, two proud blue Russian dolls.

They left together, one in the other’s wake. Noah floated over to the hallway table beneath the mirror. In front of a candle votive and decorative bowl from somewhere oceans away, there lay a creamy parchment envelope, the familiar stamp seal bearing the raven crest of Aglionby Academy. The seal had been broken and the envelope already opened and left behind, which allowed Noah to examine it with a wary finger. A few seconds’ cursory inspection granted him understanding of its contents:

_Graduation._ An invitation. So that was why Sarah hoped he might be there, why it was “time,” why they had dressed nice, why Sarah and her father were actually going to be co-existing in the same place. _Graduation._ It has seemed so looming when he and Barrington had reunited after separate vacations over Spring Break. (The Czernys had gone skiing at the Alps.)

“God, man,” Noah could remember Bar saying, heaving out a sigh before inhaling more of his second joint of marijuana for the day. Noah had taken the joint from his friend’s fingers, taken a drag himself, and blown a perfect smoke circle at the other’s face: a skill Bar had never yet mastered. “I can’t believe in a few weeks it’s finals season, and then graduation, and then all the yuppies will be packing away all their Ralph Lauren and mourning their parents’ yachts before they all flock off to Harvard and Yale and Brown.”

“And Columbia,” reminded Noah. He happened to know Whelk wore Ralph Lauren, and liked it, too. But it didn’t matter. The idea was, in Whelk’s mind at least, that the two of them would be kings by then; gods promoted to some divine throne by whatever mysterious and otherworldly riches the ley line promised. That meant everyone else was to be looked down upon, in preparation. _They_ were better than Harvard and Yale and Brown, in this vision of the future. (And Columbia.)

But Whelk only made a disgruntled noise at the addition, and turned away. Noah had just shrugged.

Had that really been only a matter of weeks ago? Now, dead, it seemed like years.

It had turned out Barrington was right, anyway. Neither of them would, in fact, be part of the Ralph-Lauren-sporting “yuppie” horde soon to storm the castles of the Ivy Leagues awaiting them. Instead, Bar and his family were disgraced.

And Noah was dead.

Noah put down the envelope. Bar would be at graduation today, in all likelihood. The semester’s tuition had already been paid for, so they couldn’t reasonably kick him out; not that late. So would Noah’s family. So would not Noah.

An over-tall wood door slammed, crashing the present into Noah’s awareness. It was his youngest sister, Lily, who had apparently decided that now that Sarah and their mother were gone, it was safe to thunder out of her room and jog hurtlingly downstairs. Her dark curls bounced with each furious plummet, and Noah watched her, amazed, as he always was, that such a whimsical, disagreeable, Brownie-like creature could have sprung from their regal, constrained mother and unreliable, peripresent father. Then again, he could consider himself an odd product of the Czerny parents, as well. The lot of his family was geniuses, ambitious and accomplished. Noah liked to smoke weed and play Tony Hawk Pro Skater and decorate his non-uniform-days Doc Martens with puffy glitter fabric paint.

He and his youngest sister were, in their contrastingness, alike.

He watched as Lily snatched the keys from the corner table down the hall with all the ferocity of a harpy, cast another glance at the Aglionby Academy Graduation Ceremony notice with knotted brows, and straightened to follow her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing about the Czerny family is canon except that it consists of a father, a mother, and two sisters outside of Noah, as described at the funeral in TRB. Therefore I have decided to make up names and personalities for them. Lena Czerny and Amos Czerny, in this fic, have three children: the eldest being Noah, middle being Sarah, and youngest Lily. Not sure how much I'll explore this, but I at least have a little in mind for the next chapter.
> 
> Also, I wanted to point out that when describing Sarah and Lena as "Russian dolls," I am describing them as mimicked versions of each other in increasing or decreasing scale; the term is not meant to imply that the Czernys are Russian. (Czerny is in fact a Slavic last name that could originate from a smattering of different countries.)


End file.
